ART REVIEW; With Two Exhibitions, the Hudson River Museum Exults in Its New Look

By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

Published: October 8, 2006

The Hudson River Museum is finally undergoing a facelift, with a new entry and reception area coupled with a revamped gift shop. It is just the beginning of a comprehensive renovation planned in stages over the next five years. And it is long overdue. This is one of the largest museums in the Hudson River region, but for some years it has been looking rundown, even derelict.

Accompanying the opening of the new entry area (the official reception is on Friday) is a suite of exhibitions, among them a panoramic painting by Sylvia Sleigh, a recent gift from the artist to the museum, and 65 photographs by the mid-20th-century American photojournalist Guy Gillette.

Born in Minnesota in 1922, Mr. Gillette was trained as an actor before he packed off for World War II. He returned to the United States and became a photographer, using contacts in the theater business to gain access to stars. He photographed actors, singers, writers, composers and choreographers, including Elvis Presley, Sarah Vaughn, Audrey Hepburn, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein.

Two lovely if staged photographs of Hepburn were taken in 1951 when she was appearing on Broadway in ''Gigi.'' Another photograph, taken at the Hudson River Museum in 1976, shows the curved backside of a naked woman through an open window. It is momentarily shocking, until you realize the woman is made of marble.

Other photographs document important social, cultural and political events of the era, including the civil rights movement, the construction of Lincoln Center and the Korean War. You can pick and choose favorites here, but the image that resonates most for me is that of young infantry replacements reporting to a combat regiment in Korea. It reminds me of those young men in Iraq.

Many of Mr. Gillette's photographs were originally taken to accompany magazine stories in Fortune, Life and The New York Times Magazine. They retain traces of their original purpose, being for the most part brutally direct, detached and minimal, with the artist using his camera to illustrate an idea rather than to tell a story. That is the difference between good journalistic photographs, which Mr. Gillette mostly made, and art.

He also made images purely for fun, like a shot of a train full of Westchester commuters heading into New York City, each buried in a newspaper. Nearby is a quickly caught image of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower at a state dinner being patted lightly on his bald pate by an anonymous man in a suit. If the photograph wasn't dated 1964, you could easily believe it was doctored.

Day-tripping from New York up the Hudson River, rather than workaday commuting, is the subject of Ms. Sleigh's vast realist panorama of a painting, ''Invitation to a Voyage: The Hudson River at Fishkill'' (1979-1999), which the artist worked on sporadically for 20 years.

Born in Wales in 1916, Ms. Sleigh came to New York in 1961 with her husband, Lawrence Alloway, the art critic, art historian and curator, and still lives in Chelsea. She was a part of the early feminist art movement and achieved notoriety in the 1970's for her provocative realistic pictures of nude men in the manner of historical images of women. They were considered quite scandalous.

''Invitation to a Voyage'' is divided into two parts; the separate yet interrelated paintings are each about 35 feet long with seven contiguous panels. The first, referred to as the ''Riverside'' group, depicts the artist, her husband and their friends frolicking on the banks of the river by the railway line opposite Bannerman Castle on Pollopel Island. The second, known as the ''Woodside'' panels, depicts a similar group of people wandering the woods above the river.

The painting contains all kinds of subtle painterly references to the work of other artists, ranging from the experimental group portraits of Edouard Manet to the pastoral scenes of the 18th-century French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau. But it is the intimate, episodic quality of the panels and moments of often touching interaction between the individuals that really give the painting its beauty and charm.

Then of course there is the river, its sharp, glassy illumination redolent of summer heat.

Photos: PANORAMA -- Above, seven panels from Sylvia Sleigh's 70-foot-wide ''Invitation to a Voyage: The Hudson River at Fishkill'' (1979-1999). Left, ''Girl in Graveyard, Homecoming, 1955,'' one of 65 photographs by Guy Gillette on exhibit.